Rain Clouds

Dark skies

Warm summer days feel so distant as I look up at the sky to the dark rain clouds above. Some days I embrace the rain, the quenching of the dry earth in my garden after a heatwave, the invigorating energy of a thunderstorm. On days when the sky stays a gloomy grey and the rain is relentless I feel like it is energy zapping. The light becomes too poor to draw by and the colour palette in my work seems to change from the vibrant greens and blues to darker tones.

Today, I'm sharing with you one of my recent ink drawings 'Rain clouds' from a series of drawings I have created called 'Strange Creatures'. In this series the paper is prepared with ink marks and water and ink washes, to create monochrome surfaces of pattern before a dip pen is used to create a line drawing.

For this piece water was applied to the paper in the form of droplets, then tiny amounts of watered down ink was added to each droplet to create the effect of a rain drop once dried. A large pool of water was placed at the top of paper, and then ink gently dropped into the water to create the rain cloud. The paper was placed at a slight angle to dry so that the ink would be darker towards the base of each water droplet.

Once the water droplets had dried a dip pen and drawing ink was used to draw in the figures.

An important part of my practice as an artist is experimentation with materials. I dedicate time to trying out new materials or techniques, and expand my approaches to drawing. This year I've been using a lot of black ink to create my drawings, this really started to be the main medium I was working with when I was creating the illustrations for Doug Karr's novel Dwelling. It is a medium I continue to return to as I explore the relationship between the wet medium of ink and the surface qualities of the papers.

Rain Clouds

Ink on paper
Part of the 'Strange Creatures' collection.

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Dwelling available on Amazon

I'm thrilled to announce that DWELLING, an illustrated crime novel collaboration between myself and fellow Steemian @dougkarr, set in New York’s Lower East Side, is now available in print and ePub.